Introduction: The focus areas of Institutional Research (IR) practitioners in South Africa and an analysis of the synergy between these focus areas and the major higher education policy developments
during the first two decades of the democratic dispensation in South Africa are the concerns
of this chapter. To what extent did these policy developments determine the priorities of IR
practitioners, or, to what extent did the results of the work of IR practitioners provide the
evidence on which these policies were based? Or, is this a complex, dynamic relationship and
that plays out in both directions at different times and in different contexts? Despite various
voices arguing for multiple new roles for IR, for example, Swing (2009), and Calderon and
Webber (2015), Saupe’s (1981) and Dressel’s (1981) classic definition that IR is conducted
to support institutional management, and by implication, to provide evidence on which
(policy) decisions can be based, remains a valid expression of what institutional leaders and
policy makers expect from IR. On the other hand, the extent to which higher education
policy makers actually base their decisions on the information provided by IR practitioners,
is not easy to demonstrate definitively with empirical evidence. Therefore no assertions will
be made in this chapter regarding any possible causal link between higher education policy
developments and the work of IR practitioners, and consequently the softer term “synergy”
was chosen to characterise the aim of the study.